Editorial: Vote delay gives fracking issues time to sort out

When the Butte County Board of Supervisors ordered a 30-day study of a fracking-ban initiative, pushing action on the measure beyond the deadline for the November election, it appeared on its face to be a classic bureaucratic stall measure.

It may actually have been that, in the minds of the supervisors who voted for the study. They had already authorized work on a county ordinance to ban fracking, and the initiative has always seemed to us to be a bit of a redundancy. To the supervisors, it may well seem an annoyance.

For those who might still be unclear about this, fracking is the injection of water or other substances into the ground to fracture underground rock to ease extraction of oil and natural gas.

It isn't being used in Butte County, and it isn't likely to be used in Butte County, because everyone here realizes the wealth below the surface here is water, not our meager natural gas deposits.

Natural gas has been harvested here for decades, and it still is being collected on a very limited basis. But it's far easier and far more profitable to draw water. The infrastructure is in place and the buyers are numerous and eager, from legitimate users to illegal and quasi-legal foothill marijuana growers.

Why invest in all the periphery necessary to benefit from injecting water into the ground, when extracting water from the ground instead is so profitable on its own?

So why is this an issue?

Well, there's money to be made by fracking, and the less interference in the process, the more money there is to make. But the reaction — which seems to be the rule rather than the exception these days — is that it's an all-or-nothing matter.

There are people who simply oppose any new technology on its face. Paradoxically, the new technology of the Internet has supercharged technology opposition by widely distributing vast amounts of anecdotal information about any new development, without any vetting whether it is true or not. Proven fact gets no more weight than fiction on America's computer screens. And whatever reads the best gets believed and spread.

Fracking foes are painting a picture of immediate danger. There's no evidence fracking is going on here, but the Wild Goose operation is accused of it because there's no other potential bad guys out there. Wild Goose stores natural gas from Canada in tapped-out wells down along the border with Sutter County, and fracking doesn't make sense given the firm's business model. Doesn't matter.

Fracking proponents are no better, doing things like challenging the initiative petitions because of type style rather than content, and predicting economic doom if the ban moves forward. It's the kind of thing that just feeds an underlying paranoia. If there's no fracking here, why is a San Rafael law firm in a Butte County courtroom?

Right now the issue is being painted as black or white, when undoubtedly it'll end up being more gray. There may be places where fracking is just fine, and there may be places where it's a really bad idea — like under Butte County's prime farmland, where a massive and pristine aquifer lies.

There are also questions of what impact a ban would have on our local government. Preventing extraction of natural gas from beneath a piece of land could be regarded taking of a private resource by the public, and we the public may be liable to compensate a property owner for the value we have taken from him.

These things can be sorted out, but not between now and the November election. It'll take a couple of years to figure it out, and what the supervisors have done, intentionally or otherwise, is give us that couple of years.